1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a holder/shelf accessory to slot-wall panel merchandising and more particularly to a video cassette display module for such use. Following the success of the video cassette recorder (VCR) in the marketplace, the business of renting and/or selling movies for home viewing has grown phenomenally since 1980. At first, merchandising techniques were often ignored in the scramble for business. Now, as competition has become fierce, video store operators are sharpening their marketing skills in an effort to get greater selection on their shelves but, at the same time, win sales through effective product presentation.
To this end, slot-wall (or slat-wall) is being widely used today because it is attractive and utilizes space efficiently. Slot-wall is basically a four-foot by eight-foot panel of three-quarter inch particle-board (dimensions may vary) with parallel channels, usually T-shaped, routed straight across one dimension and spaced on equal centers over the surface. The purpose of the panel is to form the extended vertical surface of a display wall or other display merchandiser and the routed channels, or "slots", form the female receptacle for display holders/shelves having by design corresponding male interengaging appendages. This merchandising technique is very effective but the less expensive accessories associated with slot-wall and used by video outlets have been less than satisfactory.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Video cassettes are packaged for marketing in individual containers which are decorated exteriorly with promotional material designed to stimulate visually the impulse buying habits of the home-movie market. Often these promotional jackets are placed on display with the package contents (the video cassette) being kept behind the work counters of the store. On the display shelves, the promotional material can be "stocked" side-by-side, like books, with spines only viewable by the buying public or it can be "displayed" with the merchandising jackets showing to their best advantage. The stocking mode gives the store manager maximum product quantity on his/her shelves but the space consuming display mode wins sales.
There are currently, to the inventors' knowledge, three basic means of merchandising video cassettes on slot-wall: the standard shelf, the tray and the video cassette holder. Standard shelves are hand-fabricated by bending sheet plastic on "heat-strips". This weakens the molecular structure of the material at the line of bend, especially in the dimensionally thin stock used in this instance, rendering it fragile. Trays are usually made by plastic extrusion. They are less expensive but tend to warp. The holder, commonly referred to as the "widget", is injection molded plastic and inexpensive. The design tends to be sloppy in its slot mount making contents insecure and leading to considerable breakage. On the standard shelf, one can stock video cassettes much the same as books; i.e. side-by-side with spines only viewable or face-out with a frontal view of the jacket cover showing. A four-foot slot-wall shelf will accommodate, side-by-side, about 30 cassettes maximum --less if any are positioned face-out. In the case of the face-out positioning on standard shelves, the cassette is obscured by its neighbor when viewed from side angle because the viewing plane differs from cassette to cassette. The slot-wall tray will accept video cassettes in the face-out position only with a four-foot tray accommodating about 10 cassettes. The "widget" holds one video cassette obliquely to the vertical plane of the slot-wall at a viewing angle of 45 degrees displaying the spine and a desired portion of the frontal jacket. A four-foot section of slot-wall will accommodate for display about 17 widgets and their contents.
Considering the foregoing, the video store manager's problem is, then, to achieve the right balance between what the writer has called "the stocking mode and the display mode". The inventors feel they have achieved the optimum marriage of these two considerations and have frozen their concept in a superior plastic merchandiser that can be economically mass-produced.